I've built a small module that expects to see data organized in RGB for LED strings, RGB + I for the GE-35 light strings, RGBW for LED strings I've ordered and RGBW+I for lamps used on the 2010 Olympic Rings in Vancouver.

So far all I've been able to get VIXEN 3 Megatrees working with the standard LED strings since the VIXEN Magatree uses RGB.
Is there a way to construct Megatrees with RGBW? I can force the GE-35 lights software to always have full intensity and just receive RGB. But the other lights have white LEDs I like to use.

Pretty sure when you setup the display under the colour handling section you can select RGBW if memory serves me correctly, not sure if this will help you but this is where i remember seeing the RGBW options,
Question for you, are the LED strings Pixel Strips or just normal dumb RGBW strips?

I have three different types of pixel RGB types.
1. Tape of 5050 RGB LEDs with WS2801 drivers (32 on the tape)
2. GE-35 Christmas light strings RGB+I (1 with 25 lamps, 9 with 50 lamps). These are addressed with addr(6 bits), intensity(8 bits) and RGB (12 bits).
3. On order, two 5m tapes with I believe 60 RGB+W LEDs per meter. I think WS2811 drivers.
4. Ring Lights. These have 36 LED with 20 degree beam angle organized as 9 each of RGB+W along with a group intensity I. These lights are run from Controller Area Network Messaging (CAN Bus).

The ring lights are being repurposed to act as Bollard Lamps with a reflector to also serve as path lights. The bi-directional nature of the CAN bus allows each lamp to potentially be connected to a PIR motion detector or some other sort of input as they have some spare inputs on the board. As path lights they can sit with a dim white until someone passes a sensor at the end of the path. The lights will then ripple on to full brightness upwards or downwards and stay on for a period of time or while other sensors see motion.
Once the time delay is done the lights ripple back to low or off more slowly following the speed of the person on the path.

But, on Valentines day they'd be RED. On St. Patricks day Green of course. Easter would have a number of the yellow, pink, purple pastel colours. Halloween Orange. Christmas just about anything. July 1st CANADA day would be red and white.

And at any time part of the Christmas light show controlled by the PC show software in conjunction with everything else.

I can write the software to totally ignore white and intensity and make each look like a simple WS2801 RGB addressable pixel string. But I'd like to be able to do the Mega Trees and have pure white rather than mixed RGB be part of the show. I don't think the current MegaTree allows that but it's possible that I just don't know how to configure it.

Attached Files:

bpj1980 is right, the colour handling is where you set up this. Then you can just sequence whatever colour you want.
A lot of the elements in vixen already have a lot of setup done now for the most popular configurations (which is awesome and saves so much time) but you can go in and change it to whatever you want in the manual setup section.

Attached Files:

Thank you. I've tried that but it has it's own set of problems. More of an issue in how the sequencer treats the MegaTrees. Even just programming a single row of 50 pixels to do some sort of chase sequence is incredibly tedious so the MegaTree (macro if you will) makes things easier.
But it's really I think targeted at either RGB lamps or multiple strings of single colours.
For example as per scamper's screen grab I have a MegaTree designed with 5 patch points. However I don't think that's applicable here. At best I can use 4 patch points for RGBW
The Intensity parameter has to remain independent. Think of it this way. Combine RGB to create a particular shade with 75, 125, 200. Now dim that colour to black.

Can't do it. Once you've dimmed 75 steps the R part of the colour is gone. So dimming causes a colour change. However, treat that colour as (75,125,200) x I then if I is 1 % you get .75, 1.25,2. Assuming the LEDs are linear (they're not of course) the colour remains true but at a lower saturation. That's how my TL59116 LED controller does it. The intensity is something like 100Hz PWM while the PWM on individual channels is I think 50kHz.

I'm not even sure how you'd add that into a Mega Tree sting of pixels. Each pixel needs 5 elements grouped as RGB + W + I. Any of the Megatree features would manipulate the RGB to make any colour. Any code to dim a colour of a pixel should reduce the Intensity Parameter. But the RGBWI combination treats each of those as a shade that is changeable. It doesn't understand the Intensity value.

I think for now my solution is going to be to create a second Megatree with a single colour (white) that I can control independently from the RGB Megatree sequences. Perhaps the same with the intensity. And map them after the RGB in the DMX packet.